
Art Genève, Palexpo, Geneva 30 January 2030 - 2 March 2025
Dessiner la modernité. Œuvres sur papier de la Fondation Gandur pour l’Art
The Fondation Gandur pour l’Art is pleased to participate in the 13th edition of Art Genève, held from 30 January to 2 February 2025 at Palexpo, Geneva. For the occasion, the Fondation will present Dessiner la modernité. Œuvres sur papier de la Fondation Gandur pour l’Art (Drawing Modernity: Works on Paper from the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art), revealing a little-known aspect of its art collection, in contrast with the Fondation’s abstract art exhibitions focusing on works created after 1945. This chronological departure stems from Jean Claude Gandur’s discovery of the Purist works of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier.
Curator : Bertrand Dumas
Jean Claude Gandur developed an interest in drawing when he discovered the Purist works of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier. Starting with the painter and the architect, the collector has assembled a collection allowing viewers to grasp the essence and development of their shared artistic approach. This approach emerged in the ambivalent context of the post-war period, when the "Roaring Twenties" were a time not only of euphoria but also of a painful reconstruction. Alongside scientists and engineers, whose precision they admired, the artists on display would all take part in this “renaissance” by devoting themselves to the search for a new artistic language. This is expressed, through the thirty-five works on display, via an identical quest for rationality and universality.
“The war is over, everything is being organized, clarified, and purified [...].” It was with these programmatic words that Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who had not yet adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier, introduced their manifesto to Purism, published in November 1918. The new art for which they advocated was fuelled by an obsessive desire for sobriety and clarity and was born in reaction to the decorative excesses of late Futurism and Cubism. To put their theory into practice, the two accomplices operated a synthesis of forms reduced to their purest state, i.e., to their geometric essence. This mathematical apprehension of the object veers towards abstraction in some of the most accomplished Purist works.
In Purist compositions, objects are formed with an efficiency and mechanical precision that can be found in the compositions of Willi Baumeister or Auguste Herbin, which display this same ingenious and playful relationship between geometric forms. The latter stemmed from the fascination exerted by the machine on most Modernist artists, as may be seen in the study for Sourire noir by Czech artist František Kupka or the Kinematogramm by the German Robert Michel, displaying the cogs of a crankshaft. Icons of modern times, these works illustrate the new driving forces that punctuated 1920s’ art and industry. Amid this cacophony of mechanical forces, the delicate drawings of Léon Tutundjian add a poetic note to this unique ensemble. Fleeing the Anatolian Plateau in Turkey, this Armenian, who arrived in Paris in 1924, was the author of vibrant black inks, sprinkled with graphite, evoking a shower of stars.

Salon Art Genève
Booth A34
Palexpo – Geneva
Route François-Peyrot 30
1218 Le Grand-Saconnex
Artworks in focus
August 2018 Fine Arts
Table, pipe, livres, bouteille, papier by Amédée Ozenfant
In March 2018, the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art seized the opportunity to acquire one of Amédée Ozenfant's most ambitious and rare drawings, still in private hands, on the Paris art market. His upcoming departure for the Tokyo exhibition, Le Corbusier and the Age of Purism at the National Museum of Western Art (19.02 - 19.05.2019), is an opportunity to appreciate in detail his high formal and technical qualities while analyzing his pivotal position in the graphic work of the founder of Purism.
Publication
January 2025 Journal